Special interest topics

There are communities within OpenStreetMap interested in mapping many different features. See the Features category for an introduction to mapping many different types of feature. Interest areas include:

Development partners:OpenStreetMap development partners lets international development and humanitarian organizations list point people that are working on OpenStreetMaps for better visibility and coordination.

Infrastructure: At the heart of OSM is information about the road network (see Highways), railways (use Railways for a tagging introduction) and WikiProject Metro systems to find out about the project to map the world's metro systems. And then there is WikiProject Power networks which focuses on mapping the electric and gas distribution and generation systems.

Marine and shipping: The OpenSeaMap project collects and adds information needed for navigation at sea including locations of lighthouses and details of harbours, and display it together with bathymetric data, weather charts and other dynamic data fo all water sport enthusiasts like sailors, divers, canoeists.

Collaborations:Wikipedia (interoperation with Wikipedia includes more than 1.7 MiB of data linking to Wikipedia-articles displayed in the map), WikiProject FLOSS (Supporting Free Libre and Open Source Software and geospatial software/data).

Special Populations: These include ethnic groups or geographical areas with unique characteristics, such as Native American reservations in the United States. Though Native American reservations, which tend to be highly rural, are included in TIGER data in the United States, typically the data is incomplete or inaccurate. Lately, tribes have taken matters into their own hands and have created their own data. This also is true in other parts of the world.